Bleh

But when I first started reading Wiki talk pages after years of using bulletin boards I had no clue as to what was happening.

That is why liquid threads was developed, because people new to MediaWiki were unfamiliar with the system and prefered the blog/facebook/BB style thread.

I figured that much.

Now if ONLY the Facebook system was this useful...

I have just found that the new message thing Human was complaining about on my talkpage is a much better way of finding replies to your post.

I don't use facebook so I couldn't comment.

I'm finding it better than scanning recent changes and hoping I've caught the right one. And the fact it highlights new posts is useful if someone is sending threads off in different directions.

I'm in agreement that this thing is far from finished, but the potential is there and I think the benefits for running better discussions could be had now. It might not be best for the extremely short casual chit-chat of the saloon bar, but for where replies tend to be longer on average (with an increased risk of edit conflicts) and where threads go off on tangents this is a far superior way of doing it.

That said, it'd be nice if it could collapse the posts above the highlighted replies, rather than nesting everything and you having to scroll down to find them. But again, this is no different to scrolling down a tl;dr discussion in the normal talk page manner so it's more a problem that it doesn't solve than a problem it creates.

Isn't that what the arrow does? (Which should be a lot smaller and maybe down the bottom of the comment)

No, it just seems that clicking the arrow above a nest of comments collapses the whole thing into an outline of peoples sigs.

It's also messed up for me doing that, showing just a repeat of the same sigs over and over again. Unless you and I have had a conversation in this thread with 100 posts apiece without me noticing.

The repetition is obviously a bug. It is suppose to fold so you can see the next reply to the comment.